Google today showed off some new Android phones, a laptop, two Home assistants, and a genuine surprise: a set of earbuds that attempt to emulate Douglas Adams’ legendary Babel Fish – a real-time language translator.
During the hardware unveiling, an event dubbed Made by Google, in San Francisco a few hours ago, CEO Sundar …

Re: No audio jack

Re: No audio jack

@ jaywin "If they can waterproof the USB-C, I see no reason they can't do it to a headphone jack."

Exactly. Google and Apple (to name two) are massive companies worth billions and with billions in the bank. I can't believe for a second that they couldn't develop, or find someone who could develop, a 3.5mm jack with suitable water resistance if it can be done for the USB-C/Lightning ports. I accept omitting the 3.5mm jack means they have more flexibility on device thickness and have a little more space inside the unit, but, as said by another in this thread, people are more likely to use their 3.5mm ear buds than go swimming with their phone. Also there aren't many people complaining their phone ought to be another mm thinner. This is all about pulling people further into the walled gardens and ensuring they cannot use their existing accessories while in there.

Re: No audio jack

paulf wrote: I accept omitting the 3.5mm jack means they have more flexibility on device thickness and have a little more space inside the unit,

There is always the option of using a 2.5mm jack, which became common when pre-touchscreen phones got really small. All existing headphones will work with an inexpensive adapter that can remain attached to the headphones.

Re: No audio jack

@ druck "There is always the option of using a 2.5mm jack,"

True, but it takes us straight back to the same problem - having to use an adaptor to get standard 3.5mm kit to work with it. Existing headphones should work with a USB-C/Lightning to 3.5mm jack adaptor too. The pain is having to use an adaptor at all.

Re: No audio jack

I have a Samsung phone (XCover4) that has removable battery, headphone jack, micro usb and it's IP68. Yes it might be easier to make the phone waterproof without the headphone jack but it sounds (to me) like you've wimped out if you do.

Re: No audio jack

"If they can waterproof the USB-C, I see no reason they can't do it to a headphone jack."

It's nothing to do with waterproofing, despite El Reg constantly bringing it up. There are already a variety of devices around that manage to be waterproof despite having open 3.5mm sockets. If anything, it's much easier than the USB socket - the Xperia Z1 had a rubber seal for the USB, but the 3.5mm socket was just open (just a shame about the shit build quality that meant the glass panels peeled off the front and back; the sockets were the only parts that actually stayed waterproof).

Getting rid of headphone sockets is done for precisely one reason - cost. It's one less part that needs designing and buying, and takes up space that makes fitting the rest of the internals more difficult. The move is happening now because, presumably, it's finally reached the point where bluetooth speakers are popular enough anyway that the cost savings more than offset any lost sales.

Re: No audio jack

I don't believe for one second a headphone jack that costs, what, two bucks in parts and assembly costs (lets say 3 bucks if you add in design cost shared across millions of devices) is going to make any tangible difference on a handset costing £800-£1000. Even if they did put up the price by a tenner to compensate it wouldn't matter - people buying flagship phones aren't usually that price conscious, hence "Cupertino Idiot-tax operation".

Re: No audio jack

Re: No audio jack

My wife was seriously thinking of abandoning Apple when they dropped the headphone jack from their flagship devices, but bought a "budget" (ho ho) iphone SE when she discovered they still had a 3.5mm audio jack.

Google, please take note. I'm an Android user, and I want a 3.5mm headphone jack too.

Re: No audio jack

Re: No audio jack

USB-C and bluetooth headphones are the future. Personally I'm going to stick with wired headphones because they always work. I did have a pair of bluetooth headphones but I didn't use them for about 2 months and when I tried to recharge them, they wouldn't so I had to throw them away.

Re: No audio jack

Re: No audio jack

Waterproof is great, but here's the question to ask yourself: how often do I use my phone in the pool, and how often do I use my earphones/earbuds?

When I was like 8 years old (ie damned near 40 bloody years ago!) I had a waterproof radio that had a headphone jack. The jack was sealed, basically a standard one coated in rubbed IIRC. This was in the '80s. Surely firms with the tech knowhow that Google has must have someone who can figure that out. If not, Google, I am currently seeking work and I can design lots of trivially simple ways for you to waterproof stuff!

Re: No audio jack

If you ever drop your non waterproof phone in a urinal you will appreciate the dilemma of a phone that can't survive a thorough wash afterwards.

If I ever drop my phone in the urinal, I will appreciate the joy of buying the cheapest phones I can find, and leave it there! :)

I had a friend who went through a period of dropping phones in toilets, very expensive as the phones didn't survive. Taught him 2 simple tricks to stop that. 1) don't be on the phone (and perhaps don't take it in with you), 2) put it in a closed pocket that has a zip or other fastener. True, with some guys they may want to do some "left handed surfing" on their phone while in the bog, but that's their problem if they loose control of things. If they can't handle things safely they should learn not to play with them in there!

Re: Well Done, Google, From The Large Unilingual Traveller Road Warriors Gang

"In VietNam almost every cab / taxi has a dash-mounted Android device that translates between English and Tieng Viet. Without the Google translation facility life would be much harder."

This is an excellent idea and as a use for a native speaker trying to understand / speak foreign languages like you've described, full kudos for whoever first thought of it.

However I get the impression that the standard use scenario envisaged will involve a foreign language speaker using the phone to translate the native language to what ever language they speak, for example an English speaker going to Japan and using the phone to translate Japanese into English. Isn't this going to fall foul of the problem associated with all internet based technologies, it'll cost a fortune in roaming data costs?

Re: Well Done, Google, From The Large Unilingual Traveller Road Warriors Gang

I hope it does a better job than the translation between German and English. I was tight for time and thought I'd bung some English text through Translate to save time...

After falling off my seat laughing, I finally translated it by hand.

One of the problems that Translate has is formal English. It seems to work better with American slang than proper English. Terms like "do not" translated into "do this", whereas "don't" translated properly. I put in a bunch of changes at the time and it seems that Translate is now better, but I still wouldn't trust it with anything important or where a misunderstanding could be dangerous.

Having it translate things like "do not open the case, high voltage inside" being translated into "open the case, high voltage inside" are funny at first glance, but dangerous.

Hilarious on the other hand was "do not open the case, no user servicable parts inside", which ended up with the German equivalent of "open the case, no parts inside"!

Re: Well Done, Google, From The Large Unilingual Traveller Road Warriors Gang @big_D

I did post corrections to the sample I gave, although not what you got. It is improving, but these sorts of problems seem all to common, at least in English <-> German. I have worked as a translator for an agency and there are good tools that you can use for translation, like Leo, Linguee etc. but the actual translation sites are all pretty poor.

They might be okay for getting directions or simple sentences, but you shouldn't rely on them for anything important.

Re: My Hovercraft is full of eels.

and by the time the appropriate recording has been retrieved, the terrorist with a shopping list (google, take me to the nearest diy store, then the supermarket, and on the way back let's take a tour of that army base) will have been long GONE! OMG, we've got to do something about it! ;)

Re: My Hovercraft is full of eels.

But, seriously, take one step back, and realise that this is just another Stasi Wet Dream bugging device - there has to be a central server everything goes back and is recorded (for ever).

Never saw it like that! Storing audio takes a lot of space, storing text takes very little. If you can build voice recognition systems that can do a "stand up in court" level of converting speech to text.

Of course, text loses all sorts of information like tone and inflection (and background noises), and people tend to replace those with what they imagine fits.

So, it is not self contained, and uses your Smart phone which likely uses Google servers, to listen to all your personal and business conversations, and likely politicians discuss nation compromising stuff. Save us.

Can't somebody make a little computer that has self contained live translation and max encrypted ear buds. You speak, it translates to the other person, and it translates but also translate to the other language and optionally translate hat back.again in your ear, for you to check (experience with Google translation)?

Probably eventually they can, given the increasing computing power and storage available on phones. Google is a cloud company though, and don't control the hardware (other than the tiny segment of market share Pixel has) so I wouldn't look for them to do that.

Some might suggest Apple is the more likely candidate, with their emphasis on privacy and an SoC twice as fast as anyone else's. However, even with all the cloud resources Google is able to throw at it, Google Translate is still laughably bad for trying to act as a Babel Fish, cute pre-planned demo notwithstanding. If you doubt that, pick a random Reg sized news story written in another language and let Google have a go at it, and see how poorly it does. It does well enough to kind of get the gist of it, but it hurts your brain to read, and would drive you nuts if you had it speaking that way in your ear!

Even if Apple could match that poor translation ability, which they probably can't, running on a phone instead of in the cloud, which may not be possible, it wouldn't be nearly good enough.

Yes, eventually, but...

As phone processing gets more powerful... yes, but you won't like it with the present level of battery power density, unless they drop this slenderness fad and give us a nice chunky phone again, perhaps with hot-swappable batteries.

And I suspect there'll be government pressure against it, from many governments, because of the enhanced privacy it'll provide. Maybe even some legislation on some weird pretext, such as classifying it as a munition?

Re: Where's the fun?

That's what strong ND filters are for. As long as people don't stay still for enough time, they won't record in the image. The disadvantage is you need long exposures, and that means a good tripod and head, and of course, it works for still subjects (i.e. architecture).

Anyway, because inanimate things can't be target of ads, especially when not related to humans, Google needs to know which people are in the image and what they have. Unlimited storage means also an unlimited data trove for Google. As machine learning algorithms improve, they can be used to analyze people in the images and profile them even better recognizing what they wear and what they use... and tell the camera what's the best moment to take a snap to maximize the gathered data.

"So when the Swedish person spoke, the English person's phone translated the Swedish into English and played it through their headphones."

Google Translate can't get that right for written text at the moment - so it is doubtful they have achieved it for real-time speech. Context is important.

Used Google Translate yesterday in my weekly run of trawling updated web pages in several European languages. Several times it omitted words completely or didn't have the vocabulary - particularly annoying when it's a negative modifier that is dropped. Words like "by", "on", "in", "with" are often given the wrong contextual meaning.

"Words like "by", "on", "in", "with" are often given the wrong contextual meaning."

yeah, English and its plethora of prepositions and their subtleties. Some lingos only have one or just a few. 'En' in spanish, is one example. How do you translate English to Spanish so that context fixes it? "It's in the box" = "Está en la caja." "no, it's not ON the box, it's IN the box" "No, no está en la caja. Está EN la caja." Yeah that'll help.

On a related note, I can think of 10 ways to say "I" in Japanese, each with its own implications, some of which might insult people if you do it wrong, or might make you sound disingenuous, or immature, or arrogant [and I'm just learning the lingo for fun, and am not an expert]. Similarly a number of ways to say 'you', some of which might carry different implications depending on the dialect people use, or who says it ['anata' vs 'omae' for example]. How do you program a translator for this? You really can't, unless the translator can read minds...

Re: Home for kids

Bleeding edge 2020 Google Summit tech: fully two way sprog-to-Tamagotchi home gateway. You get the app, it reminds you to touch the "feed" / "clean" / "play with" buttons once a day, you can do it from the other side of the globe, no need to ever physically touch the filthy little buggers at all!

Not being able to call for help after falling in a ditch and soaking your phone is a calamity.

I grew up on a country road. We didn't have your puny little laughable gutters either side, we had huge ditches that'd sometimes be close to 1m deep and 2m wide. They had to take all the rain that would fall into them until they could drain/evaporate. Me and mates would run around in them, jump bikes over them or out of them (where there was a ramp for the drive - big bonus points if you could clear the driveway). I've had a love of the outdoors and done lots of tramping and even some mountain climbing (when I was a less 'well-rounded' person). Done lots of riding and driving on country and mountain roads.

Haven't yet managed to fall into a ditch though. Even taking a dare from a friend to ride along a straight road with my eyes shut. It's actually quite easy to not do, and I sometimes wonder how many people manage to do it.

Sounds like a good way to go insane

Having an earbud live translating everything you hear into your language, using the crappy stilted translation Google Translate provides.

Sure, it is fine if you want to communicate basic stuff like telling a cab driver where to take you, or him telling you how much you owe. But it is utter shit for any sort of real conversation. Just try translating a news story written in another language. While you can tell what it is talking about, you're almost certain to end up confused about some basic facts because the translation completely misses something crucial.

We are years if not decades away from a practical Babel Fish. But hey, not being ready for prime time never stopped Google before - they think if you slap a 'beta' label on something it doesn't matter how crappy it is! I'm sure that demo was impressive, but it was canned speech they knew would be properly translated (and hey, how many people there actually spoke Swedish to know how well it even worked?)

Re: Sounds like a good way to go insane

Sure, it is fine if you want to communicate basic stuff like telling a cab driver where to take you, or him telling you how much you owe

If it does this well then this could be enough to create and own a new market and it will, of course, vastly increase Google's training materials. There are lots of people who travel to countries where they don't speak the language.

I'm more disappointed by the battery life: my Jabra Sport does 15 hours but these would be more comfortable with the cord. But some kind of pendant with battery and controls would be my preference (like my old Sennheiser)

Re: No headphone socket?

Audio jack

Though it may not have an integral audio jack, it was mentioned that the phone comes with a USB-C audio jack converter - so basically, you plug one extra little bit of plastic into your phone, along with your headphones, and its exactly the same as you have now.

Re: Audio jack

Does the USB to headphone jack convertor stop you charging the phone if you are using it?

Don't want phone draining if listening to music (many workplaces no music or other personal stuff allowed on work PC, so have to listen on phone or MP3 player) because unable to listen & charge simultaneously

Re: Audio jack

Re: Audio jack

I've always found connections to a phone a problem when on the move and have been using Bluetooth phones for over 10 years because of this. A 3.5 mm jack has quite a bit of leverage on a phone an can easily lead to considerable damage by accident. But it can be useful to plug the phone into a speaker (if it doesn't support BT or if the codec support is shitty) so the adapter is a must.

On the whole, like removable batteries, I suspect a lot of people will bitch about this change and buy them anyway.

Re: Audio jack

Which makes you think, why didn't they provide a magnetic connection for 3.5mm jack devices?

Not sure you really want magnets there, but, yes the power connections for MacBooks were a great idea. An alternative, mechanical approach would be similar to that developed by Nokia for its phones. I think it was called a "pop-port", Ericsson had something similar. If only the industry had bothered to standardise on something like that… Instead I think 3.5 won out due to the availability of standard components.

USB-C suffers from the same problems because the developers chose to solve the wrong problem. They could have chosen to create a plug that could obviously go one way and concentrated on making the connection robust but also the weakest link so that neither cable nor phone would suffer. Oh well, always hope for the next version…

In the meantime wireless charging is probably going to lead to phones without ports altogether (you can imagine some kind of maintenance port) but an entirely sealed unit will appeal to some.

I'd be impressed......

Pixie Buds

I look forward to seeing people get slapped, punched and possibly arrested because they were stupid enough to rely on this Googlefish. Google Translate is a terrible translator, often changing sentences to the opposite of their original meaning. I read an article in German yesterday that was about a man bribing a tax official and Google translated it as he was BITING the tax official. As for adding Machine Learning to everything, Translate got worse when Google added Artificial Incompetence.

USB-C Connetor

I'm not sure about USB-C. I've had an Apple MacBook since launch. Like all other Apple supplied cables, it started wearing at the point where the plastic sheath meets the metal ends. I have tried several USB-C to USB-C cables from 3rd party suppliers and whilst the sheath isn't a problem, after a couple of months use, the USB-C cables start dropping out of the laptop under their own weight. The Apple cable doesn't fall out so this doesn't seem to be a problem at the MacBook end. I know USB-A & B and micro cables are a pain because they are not reversible, but they didn't fall out on themselves, whether OEM or 3rd party.

“Hey Google, good morning”

information Disney will be allowed to collect from families

I presume it will be the usuall clusterfuck, i.e. somebody will make an article of some obscure term or condition No 356362 that allows Disney "everything". They will apologize for the "genuine error", and the world will move on....

Google Clips

essentially, an in-home cctv which never, ever, never-ever-ever, will get to google direct. But then, it's all right, as long as you don't have to, by law, install and activate it in your home (which will happen).

p.s. I wonder how much time people will spend wading through thousands of still shots every day, deciding "what to delete and what to keep". A day? ;)

Re: Google Clips

What I find very amusing is that it decides itself what is worth filming, so I definitely would not want to have one in the bedroom or other fun places. Not that that will be a problem because I don't want it at all, period. Call me fickle (but not Shirley), but I will have no products in my home from a company that once stated "you have no privacy, get over it".

USB connectors are intrinsically flimsier than headphone jacks and not really suitable for use with the phone kept in a pocket where it is subject to repeated minor movements. But if you are going to make an adaptor why not make one that is a solid unit (as seen with many old-school FM transmitters) with the jack socket to the side rather than having a cable?

Re: Sometimes I wonder...

Probably because you don't typically try to compose Facebook posts while urinating. Neither do I, but admittedly I pay a high price for that - I have friends I could hold much longer conversations with on Facebook or WhatsApp than I can verbally WHILE we're sitting at the same pub table...

Re: Sometimes I wonder...

I must be the only person left on the planet who hasn't dropped his phone in the sea or peed on it and flushed it...

No, you're not alone in that. We do seem to be quite rare though. I've not dropped a phone into any sea, river, lake, swimming pool etc. I've not dropped one in a toilet or sink. I can't recall ever even spilling a drink or other fluid on them. Closest I've come is having a pocket get flooded during a massive downpour when I was a very great many KM from shelter on a motorbike ride one day. Only, although when I left home several hours (and hundreds of K's) earlier, with no visible cloud, I put the phone in a ziploc plastic bag in the pocket. Y'know, just in case.

I use handsfree (corded, 3.5mm jack, headset I like that has been reliable and with me for a very long time now) to keep the phone in the pocket when there's a risk and I must be on a call, or I leave the phone somewhere safe and ignore it until it is safe to use it.